California homeschool requirements: 4 legal routes

The four routes

1. File a private school affidavit. You operate your home as a private school. File the affidavit online with the California Department of Education annually between October 1 and 15. It is free and requires no approval. This is the route most independent homeschoolers use, and it carries the most autonomy along with the most record-keeping responsibility.

2. Enroll in a private school satellite program. An existing private school enrolls your child and files its own affidavit. You teach at home under their umbrella. The school handles the filing and record requirements, and usually charges a fee. Good fit if you want the autonomy of route one without owning the paperwork.

3. Enroll in a public charter independent study program. Your child stays a public school student, taught at home with oversight from a credentialed teacher and, often, a funding allotment for curriculum. This route comes with public school obligations attached: state testing, assignment submission, curriculum restrictions, and no religious content purchased with public funds.

4. Hire a credentialed private tutor. The tutor must hold a valid California teaching credential for the grades taught, and instruction must run at least three hours per day for 175 days per year, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Rarely used, since the credential requirement applies to the parent if the parent is the tutor.

Routes one and two look almost identical day to day. Route three is a materially different arrangement, and families sometimes choose it for the funding without realizing they have re-entered the public system.

What the affidavit route actually requires

If you file your own affidavit, California asks for four things. This is the whole list.

File annually, October 1 through 15. The window is narrow and it is the single most common mistake. File online through the CDE's private school affidavit system. Starting mid-year? File as soon as you begin, then file again in the next October window.

Keep an attendance register. A record of who attended on which days. Days, not hours. California sets no hours requirement for private schools, unlike the 175-day, three-hour rule attached to the private tutor route.

Keep a list of courses of study. The subjects you offer. Instruction must be in English and must cover the branches of study taught in California public schools, which is a general standard rather than a prescribed curriculum.

Keep faculty qualification records. Names, addresses, and the qualifications of everyone teaching. California requires private school teachers to be "capable of teaching." No credential or degree is required for the affidavit route.

You keep all four. You submit none of them except the affidavit itself. Nobody reviews your curriculum, and there is no annual evaluation.

What California does not require

• No standardized testing for affidavit or satellite program students.

• No teaching credential for parents on routes one and two.

• No curriculum approval from anyone.

• No portfolio submission. Keep records, submit nothing.

• No progress reports to the state or district.

• No home visits. Districts have no inspection authority over private schools.

Route three is the exception to most of this, because charter students are public school students and carry public school requirements.

Withdrawing from public school

If your child is currently enrolled, do not simply stop sending them. Establish your new arrangement first, then notify the school in writing that the child has enrolled in a private school and is being withdrawn, giving the effective date.

Sequence matters here. A child who stops attending before the affidavit is filed or the satellite program enrollment is complete is, for that window, a truant. Most California homeschool trouble traces back to that gap rather than to anything about the teaching.

Records worth keeping beyond the minimum

The four required records are a floor, and the floor is low. Worth adding:

• Work samples across the year, especially writing. California will not ask, but a future state might, and so might a private high school. homeschool portfolio requirements covers what a portfolio looks like where one is actually required.

• A reading list. Titles and authors, kept running.

• Progress and mastery documentation. Where each child started and finished in each subject.

• Transcripts and course descriptions from grade nine onward, for college admissions.

• Immunization records as required for private schools.

Keep these for your family's benefit. There is no reviewer to satisfy, which is exactly why they get neglected until the year someone needs them.

Where software covers part of the record-keeping

Two of California's four required records are things a learning platform can generate rather than things you assemble.

Just Tutor Me auto-generates attendance logs and progress reports from your child's session and mastery data, for every family regardless of state, and it seeds homeschool requirements for all 50 states. Being precise about what the state-specific part means for a California family: the product record describes Ohio as the state that gets a ready-to-file notification letter with its legal citation, while every other state, California included, gets a formatted summary of that state's specific requirements pulled from the same database. California's own filing, the affidavit, is submitted directly to the CDE by you, so a summary of the requirements is the useful artifact rather than a generated form. Its printable strand reports break each subject into color-coded mastery levels as printable HTML, which works well as the progress documentation the affidavit route does not require but every family eventually wants.

The attendance log itself is already shaped like a register — it lists dated entries per day rather than a running total — but it can only log the days it can see. A day your child spent entirely on platform sessions shows up. A day spent on a co-op class, a read-aloud, or a subject not yet live on the platform does not, since the log is built from session activity, not from everything your family actually did that day. Treat it as the foundation of your attendance register for the subjects and days it covers, not a complete replacement for the register itself.

Math, Reading, Science, and Language Arts are all live now, so most of your course-of-study list is covered; other subjects still draw on outside sources. You can see what is generated on the features page, and california collects the California-specific material.

For how filing works in states that require ongoing submissions rather than a single annual affidavit, homeschool compliance reporting covers the mechanics, and state homeschool requirements puts California's approach next to the rest of the country.

The short version

Choose your route, file the affidavit in the October 1 to 15 window if you are going independent, keep four categories of records at home, and submit nothing else. California's reputation for being difficult comes from the absence of a homeschool law rather than from the burden of the requirements, which are genuinely light once you know which category you are in.

This is a general explanation of California law, not legal advice. For a truancy referral, a custody matter, or a district disputing your withdrawal, consult an attorney or a homeschool legal organization.

Frequently asked questions